Corcoran, Mary P.
(2021)
Beyond ‘food apartheid’: Civil society and the politicization of hunger in New Haven, Connecticut.
Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems, 6 (1).
ISSN 2575-1220
Abstract
This article illuminates the extent of community-based activism around food justice in New Haven, CT. Data was gathered through 28 in-depth interviews with civil society actors and participant observation across the food policy and urban agriculture (UA) sectors in the Fall of 2018. The paper traces the challenges that the sector faces
in advancing a more democratic food agenda even when the municipality is relatively open to activist claims. Three key findings are identified. (a) Following in the
American communitarian tradition, civil society groups working at grassroots level largely set the agenda for tackling food hunger in New Haven. That agenda, however, is broad-based and contradictory, incorporating initiatives aimed at addressing food insecurity and radical advocacy for food justice. (b) The efforts of civil society actors are structurally constrained by their dependence on philanthropic or grant based funding, on the one hand, and the symbolic rather than substantive support afforded by a fiscally weak, resource-poor municipality, on the other. (c) There is an inherent tension within the civil society sector arising from the disjuncture between strategies that have the effect of depoliticizing hunger and those that increasingly demand a repoliticization of hunger. These issues have been brought into sharper relief in light of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the 2020 Black Lives Matter
(BLM) mobilization, which, in concert, expose deep fissures in American society.
| Item Type: |
Article
|
| Additional Information: |
Corcoran, M.P. 2021, "Beyond ‘food apartheid’: Civil society and the politicization of hunger in New Haven, Connecticut", Urban agriculture & regional food systems, vol. 6, no. 1. |
| Keywords: |
Activism;
Apartheid;
Banking;
Citizenship;
Civil society;
Coronaviruses; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Social Sciences > Sociology |
| Item ID: |
18073 |
| Identification Number: |
https://doi.org/10.1002/uar2.20013 |
| Depositing User: |
Prof. Mary Corcoran
|
| Date Deposited: |
25 Jan 2024 14:12 |
| Journal or Publication Title: |
Urban Agriculture & Regional Food Systems |
| Publisher: |
John Wiley & Sons, Inc |
| Refereed: |
Yes |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
Repository Staff Only(login required)
 |
Item control page |
Downloads per month over past year
Origin of downloads
Altmetric
Altmetric